The impression of
[Genevieve] Taggard that one gets from [Traveling Standing Still] is a little
unexpected. If one had tended vaguely to confuse her with a familiar school of women
poets--the school which one of their number has recently herself described as the
"Oh-God-the-Pain Girls"--Miss Taggard has excluded from this book anything that
might encourage it. . . .

What we . . . get is a poet of our common human experience who, despite her fastidious
and busy mind, which embroiders it sometimes like lace, stitching it in and out, is
singularly close to the ground. Whatever she may say in her bitterer moments--expressing
herself in the admirable verses of "The Quiet Woman" and "Dissonance Then
Silence"--she accepts what life brings her as natural and right. It is this that has
made it possible for her to write, in the piece called "With Child," the only
respectable poem on child bearing that I remember ever to have seen. The point is that the
poet here does not, as is so often the case, repudiate or war with the woman. And even
"B.C.," where the note is tragic, in warning the mother of Jesus that he will
have to face "only agony and another loss of your being" in order to bring forth
"an angelic shadow," her tone is not itself agonized, but rather one of
sympathetic comprehension and resignation to the common lot. . . .

. . . With her eager intellectual appetite, she has devoured our ideas and techniques
but she has scarcely been touched by the megrims, the nausea-fits, the moods of sterility
that nowadays so often go with them. One looks forward to seeing her take her place as a
self-dependent poetic personality, in some ways essentially different from any that we
already know.

[December 12, 1928]

from Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and
Thirties (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952) 345-350.